Stirling Who? 🏁

It came to my attention that young people don't know who Stirling Moss was. Fair enough, I suppose, because his fame as a racing driver was in the 50s and 60s. He came up when discussing falling down a lift shaft with a colleague at work. Moss had a lift in his house, and fell down the shaft while in his eighties. He broke bones, but survived, and was quite light hearted about it. The incident highlights two things about him. First, he was someone who wasn't overly concerned with risk, and second he was the sort of person who had a lift installed in his house just because it's a fun gadget.

I've seen archive clips of him being interviewed about being a racing driver. He calmly explains driving on a knife edge of grip as if he were talking about growing begonias, when in fact making a mistake would involve a high speed crash and probable death, not missing out on a prize at a village show. He retired from racing when he had just such a crash that put him in a coma for a month. He'd finished second in the drivers' championship four times, and is often called the greatest driver never to win it. He also drove and won in many other categories, sometimes driving over 50 races in a year.

There was a time when his name was idiomatic for speed. He recounted being stopped by a police officer, who asked "Who do you think you are? Stirling Moss?" This was at a time when racing drivers would have seemed exotic and other worldly to most British people. Then along came Moss who was definitely an English bloke, but with a debonair manner that seemed to fit in to the world of the Grand Prix. A car driven by him and Fangio (one of the other big names of the period) sold the other day for a painfully large amount of money, so at least old people with too much cash still know who he is.